Issaquah neighborhood food scraps go full circle, help community garden

Published 1:47 pm Thursday, November 17, 2011

Issaquah gardeners went bananas Wednesday, after a community compost project turned food scraps into food for plants.

“It shows the full circle of recycling,” said Gerty Coville, manager of the King County project.

Ten Sycamore neighborhood families saved up their food scraps for three weeks in August, totally 450 pounds of waste.

Cedar Grove then turned those scraps into compost, and returned the finished product to the Issaquah Flatland Community Garden, which donates much of its food to the local food bank.

The goal of the project was to show how banana peels get recycled.Donna Misner was surprised by how much compost came out of the project. It was a big learning process for her whole family, she said. “I didn’t realize all the stuff I could compost.”

The biggest surprise for Misner was that bones could be composted, and for others it was that pizza boxes too could be thrown into the compost bins.

While the truck dumped the compost, gardeners loaded up wheelbarrows with the steaming mass and dumped them into their beds.

Gardener Steve Lloyd fills the Issaquah Flatland Community Garden with fertilizer made from an Issaquah neighborhood’s food scraps.